1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method for making secure an electronic entity with encrypted access, such as a microcircuit card, for example, the improvement being more particularly aimed at detecting differential fault analysis (DFA) attacks. The invention aims in particular to make prior art algorithms such as the AES and DES algorithms secure.
2. Description of Related Art
Certain electronic entities with encrypted access, in particular microcircuit cards, are vulnerable to DFA attacks that disrupt the execution of the cryptographic algorithm to change an intermediate result, processing the resulting difference between the message encrypted normally and the message encrypted with an error, and deducing the secret key of the electronic entity from this information. These errors are very easy to produce in a microcircuit card by operating on the external environment, for example by causing a voltage spike, exposing the card to a light flash (in particular using a laser beam), causing the frequency of the external clock to vary suddenly, etc.
The most widely used algorithm includes the data encryption standard (DES) algorithm and, the most widely used of all, the advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm. The AES and DES algorithms have the common feature of applying a succession of groups of operations known as “rounds” to an input message under the control of a series of respective sub-keys successively produced from an initial secret key specific to the electronic entity concerned. It is this initial key (denoted K hereinafter) that the fraudster attempts to reconstitute. A portion of the algorithm is devoted to generating sub-keys using a process of key extension by a function F that in the case of the AES algorithm is a non-linear function. The function is applied to said initial key, then to the result of application of said function, and so on. The sub-keys are generated from this succession of intermediate results obtained from the initial key K.
Until now, DFA attacks have been considered to be unusable in practice against the AES algorithm. However, work on which the invention is based has shown that a triple DFA attack synchronized with certain applications of the function F and the beginning of the final “round” discloses all the bytes of the last sub-key when said input key K is coded on 128 bits, which is currently the case for most systems in which the AES algorithm is used. The entry key may be recovered from this information.